Columbus Drive uses photography and weaving techniques to literally reweave stories about childhood in suburban New Jersey during the 1960s and 1970s.
Using her archive of family snapshots, the artist reprints the photographs digitally on canvas and slices them into strips.
After warping a metal loom with colored threads, she weaves the photographs back together. The finished piece includes both the loom and the woven image, forming a three-dimensional photographic object. In this way, a personal history is both remembered and reconstructed, creating a new and shared history—visibly imperfect and ephemeral.
During an earlier series of 1960s tin dollhouses, Connolly began thinking about toys used to prepare girls for their futures as housewives. She recalled her beloved potholder loom. At the same time, she was scanning her mother’s albums, and the two elements merged.
Columbus Drive is inspired by photographer Larry Sultan, who mines the terrain of family to address both personal and shared memory, as well as by Susanne Wellm, a Danish artist who combines photography and weaving in her practice. The act of cutting up and reassembling images becomes a meditation on family, history, and this period of time.
As Lilian Monk Rösing writes in her essay Weaving Time, “In ancient Greek, a loom is called ‘histos’; to weave is to tell a story.” Connolly is interested in unraveling the unspoken details of childhood and retelling the story of family from a new vantage point. As she creates patterns with colored thread and maneuvers the canvas under and over, under and over, a new image and vision are slowly revealed. In these moments, she moves back and forth in time, searching for clues to understand an elusive past.
About Pam Connolly
Pam Connolly is a lens-based artist and bookmaker who has been investigating the theme of home for more than 30 years. Her photographs of tin dollhouses, domestic spaces, and family portraits closely examine the idealized American dream, exploring childhood memory and the notion of home, as well as the tension between the imaginary and the real.
Connolly’s photographs are held in the collections of Brown University and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Her books, Fly in Amber and Cabriole, were acquired by the Hirsch Library in Houston, the University of Michigan’s Art and Design Collection, the Beinecke Library at Yale University, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. She has exhibited her work nationally at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans, Foley Gallery in New York City, and Candela in Richmond, and internationally at Kominek Gallery in Berlin and the National Portrait Gallery in London. Most recently, Connolly was shortlisted among 20 photographers selected to exhibit at the International BBA Awards in Berlin.
She was named a 2024 Critical Mass Top 50 photographer and is the creator and curator of Landau Gallery, a miniature art space showcasing photo-based art at a 1:12 scale. Connolly received an MFA in Photography from the Hartford Art School’s International Program and lives and works in New York’s Hudson Valley. [Official Website]
